Adrienne Rich

April 04, 2012

Watching the outpouring of grief and reflection over the death of Adrienne Rich last week, I admit, to my shame, that I was surprised. Surprised not because of any judgment about Rich’s poetry, which I barely know, but because I had thought of her as an icon of another era. That era, of course, was the era of the women’s movement, of which Rich was a brash troubadour, asserting the value and distinctiveness of women’s experience and lamenting their—our—submission to patriarchy. But when I came of age intellectually, in the 1990s, this mode of expression had fallen out of fashion.

December 09, 1978

Never have so many written with such technical skill: this remark, as often an expression of frustration and dismay as of admiration, has become a commonplace of poetry criticism in the 1970s. Never, of course, have so many written. And published. And competed for a lamentably small audience: there are perhaps more writers than readers of poetry at the present time.
In so diminished a sphere the consequences have been, and continue to be, predictable.

May 02, 1970

Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs
and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone
Words bitten thru words
meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch
All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor's language
Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts
like the Algerian
who has walked from his village, burning
his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this
except himself
Adrienne Rich is an American poet. This poem appeared in the May 2, 1970 issue of the magazine.